Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 81, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 543-550
Animal Behaviour

Response across a gradient: behavioural reactions of newly settled fish to predation cues

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.11.019Get rights and content

How individuals respond to predation threats will have a large influence on which individuals survive within a population. The magnitude and timing of these responses will be particularly important during periods of high predation susceptibility, such as that experienced by coral reef fishes immediately following settlement to the reef environment. Although reef fish are known to adopt certain antipredator behaviours when exposed to chemical alarm scents during this early period, the role of visual cues, and how the response varies with different levels of predation threat (both olfactory and visual), remains unknown. This study examined the behavioural response of a newly settled coral reef fish (Pomacentrus amboinensis) to different levels of an olfactory and visual predation threat. The concentration of a conspecific chemical alarm cue and the visual proximity to a potential predator (Pseudochromis fuscus) were manipulated in separate aquarium experiments. Behavioural responses were found to be threat sensitive in nature, with higher-level threat cues eliciting a more intense response. Although significant changes were observed, responses to visual cues were more inconsistent, while responses to extremely low chemical cue concentrations were marginal, indicating a possible threshold lower limit. These findings demonstrate the ability of newly settled fish to assess the level of predation risk using both visual and chemical cues, and respond appropriately.

Section snippets

Study Site and Species

This study was conducted at Lizard Island (14°40′S, 145°28′E), northern Great Barrier Reef (GBR), Australia during November and December of 2006 and 2007. The laboratories and flow-through salt water aquarium system at Lizard Island Research Station were used to conduct all experiments, while fish were collected from surrounding waters.

We used P. amboinensis as the prey species for all experimental trials. This species is common within coral reef fish communities within the Indo-Pacific,

Experiment 1: Visual Stimulus

There was a significant difference in the overall change in behaviour between the three visual cue treatments (Pillai’s Trace14,74 = 0.72, P = 0.001). The CDA shows this separation among treatments clearly, with most of the variation seemingly caused by differences in a combination of the number of bobs, the mean distance from shelter, mean height in the water column, the number of horizontal movements between zones, and the number of feeding strikes (Fig. 1). These five behavioural characters were

Discussion

Both olfaction and vision are thought to play important roles in threat detection in a wide range of systems, and have previously been demonstrated to operate in tandem in both freshwater (Mathis and Vincent, 2000, Brown and Magnavacca, 2003) and marine environments (McCormick & Manassa 2008). Their utility over other sensory systems in aquatic environments is largely a result of the aqueous medium in which they function, allowing, in particular, for the effective transmission of chemical cues

Acknowledgments

We thank J. Moore and S. de Jong for their assistance in the field. The staff of the Lizard Island Research Station (a facility of the Australian Museum) provided logistical support. This project was funded through grants supplied by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Lizard Island Doctoral Fellowship Program.

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    1

    M. I. McCormick is at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD 4811, Australia.

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